People generally prefer daylight over artificial light as their primary source of illumination. Everybody recognizes the importance of daylight in our daily lives. Daylight is known to be important for people's health and well-being.
In general, people spend over 90% of their time indoors, and often away from natural daylight. There is therefore a need for artificial daylight sources that create convincing daylight impressions with artificial light, in environments that lack natural daylight including homes, schools, shops, offices, hospital rooms, and bathrooms.
Artificial daylight sources on the market focus mainly on high intensity, tunable color temperature, and slow dynamics (day/night rhythms). It is also known to create a sky view in a ceiling using a display or foil.
There has been significant development of lighting systems which try to emulate daylight even more faithfully.
Current technology used to create daylight effects are often based on fluorescent solutions with a strong diffuser on top. It is possible to create tunable intensity and tunable color temperature solutions using this approach. However, many of these solutions do not provide a realistic daylight experience because there is hardly any direct light to provide sharp shadows. Indeed, one particular feature of natural daylight which has not been well emulated is the relation between diffuse and direct light. Direct light provides sharp shadows whereas diffuse light is less intense. An impression of natural daylight is much stronger when direct light and diffuse light components are combined.
There is therefore a need for a system which provides more realistic representations of daylight, or the passage of the moon or stars across a night sky.